Drawing/Painting Effect - viewed
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Introduction

In this Photoshop tutorial I'm going to show you a technique to create a drawing/painting effect.

We're going through the following steps:

Prepairing the image

Applying High Pass filter

Applying film grain filter

Applying cutout filter

Blending mode Overlay

Ading more definition

Blending mode multiply

1. Prepare the image

For this Photoshop tutorial I'm using following image:

You can use this image to practice yourself. In Windows
you have to right click on the image and select Save
target as...

Now let's get started.

The first thing we do after we've opened this image
is creating a duplicate. We do this by clicking on the
image in the layers palette and while holding the mouse
button we drag and drop it on the New
Layer icon .

2. Apply High Pass filter

With this new layer selected
we go to the menu and select Filter/Other/High
Pass... and
enter for radius a value of 1.5.
It all depends on the size of the image you're using. This
image is 500 pixels wide, so with an image that's pixels
wide you'll probably need to multiply this radius by 2.

3. Apply Film Grain filter

With this same
layer still selected, we go to the menu and select Filter/Artistic/Film
Grain...
We're going to use the following values:

Grain: 0

Highlight Area: 19

Intensity: 10

Highlight Area is the
most important value. In most cases you'll notice that
a value between 18-20 will
give you the best results.

The result should look something like this:

4. Blending mode Overlay

With
this layer still active, we change its blending mode
to Overlay.

5. Apply Cutout filter

We now make
the background layer active by
clicking on it in the layers palette (you will see a front
of the layer, indicating that this layer is active).

In the menu, we select Filter/Artistic/Cutout...

We enter the following values:

Number of levels: 8

Edge simplicity: 0

Edge fidelity: 3

Number of levels is always
the most important value when you use the Cutout Filter.
When you use this technique with other images, try
values between 6-8.

The result should look like this:

6. Add more definition

Make a copy of the layer with the name Background
copy (the
one with the B&W drawing) by clicking on the
image in the layers palette and while holding the mouse
button we drag and drop it
on the New Layer icon .

In the menu we select Filter/Artistic/Poster Edges...

We use the following values:

Edge Thickness: 10

Edge Intensity: 10

Posterization: 0

7. Blending mode multiply

Set the blending
mode of this layer to Multiply and
the Opacity to about 30%.

And this is the final result (after some slight sharpening):

Other example (only step 1-5):

Final words

Throughout this
tutorial I have used different blending modes and also
different settings for several filters. In general they
will give good results with most images. There are occasions
that it's better to select a different blending mode
or use slightly different settings. The global technique
that I've shown you stays the same though.